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@docrussjackson
Feb 2, 2022 • 18 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
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The long-awaited "levelling up" strategy is a joke: the Government are openly taking the piss out of the "red wall" voters they conned into voting for them in 2019: it contains fuck-all new money, is driven largely by meaningless targets, & aims for a 2030 completion!
It's like it was written on the back of a fag packet during a lockdown party. At the heart of the strategy is a plan to create more regional mayors which nobody wants!

We want decent jobs, affordable homes & functional public services - which have all but disappeared since 2008!
The largely meaningless targets hope to "level up" some areas by 2030! What a joke. What an insult. By November last year, the Govt had committed just £11billion through policies to support the regeneration of towns & communities across the UK for the period from 2020/1 - 2025-6.
Where 'levelling up' has worked IN REALITY rather than in fantasy eg in post-unification Germany, there have been MASSIVE fiscal transfers from rich regions to poor ones - approaching £1.5 TRILLION, or £70BILLION *PER YEAR*!

The Tories are offering peanuts, targets, & bullshit.
The Tories have "spaffed up the wall' almost as much on unusable & overpriced PPE - £10 BILLION - as they've allocated for levelling up!

£10 BILLION has now been written off by the useless Tory government, & auditors have rebuked the Dept of Health for pissing away voters' cash!
I think most people now understand that millions of voters have suffered decades of rising inequality & rising cost of living, decades of declining pay & working conditions, declining public services, a decline in decent affordable housing, & a serious decline in quality of life.
And I think most people now understand why after decades of the ALREADY rich getting MUCH richer, & after being ignored & treated with near contempt by successive Governments, millions of decent people wanted to give an arrogant, out of touch & cruel establishment a bloody nose.
I also think that almost everyone now realises that despite his unpopularity with many voters, & despite his many faults, a Corbyn-led Govt would NOT have ignored rising poverty & inequality, would NOT have stoked a divisive culture war, & would NOT have let 180,000 people die.
Levelling up is a con. The transfer of wealth is not from rich individuals or regions to poorer ones, but from poor to rich.

We've lived through the biggest scams in British history: first the bank bailouts, then the Brexit lies, & now COVID opportunism.

While the Tories have cut the spending power of councils in Britain's most deprived areas by 40% since 2010, I'm afraid this utter mess has been forty long years in the making.

👏Every.👏Single.👏Time.👏
"Everyone, including the Secretary of State (Mr Gove) thinks it's shit."
Some of the wealthiest parts of England, including areas represented by government ministers, have so far been allocated 10 TIMES MORE MONEY per capita than the poorest under Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda.

theguardian.com/inequality/202…
No fewer than eight of the “12 missions” at the heart of the government’s misleading & purely rhetorical "levelling up" strategy have been rehashed from a 2017 Industrial Strategy introduced by Theresa May, which was shelved by Boris Johnson.

independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…
Leopards rarely change their spots #1.
Leopards rarely change their spots #2.
The National Audit Office says just 8% of the Govt’s major projects are properly evaluated, & 64% are not evaluated at all!

The Levelling up Dept 'has wasted opportunities’ to learn where spending could have biggest impact - £BILLIONS could be wasted.

civilserviceworld.com/professions/ar…
The NAO head Gareth Davies warned in a piece for The Times earlier this month that the government is “not learning from its successes or failures” because departments DO NOT FACE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES for failing to evaluate their own work.

Sounds familiar...🤔

#SueGrayReport

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More from @docrussjackson

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Nov 21
🧵

In May, Reform UK became the UK’s first party to accept crypto donations; experts warned of major money-laundering and foreign interference risks.

The NCA says Tether—backed by Reform’s £13.7M donor Christopher Harborne—has been used by Russia to fund its war in Ukraine. Image
A multibillion-dollar scheme that exchanges cash from drug and gun sales in the UK for crypto—digital tokens hiding users’ identities—has enabling “sanctions evasions and the highest levels of organised crime, including providing money-laundering services to the Russian state”.
theguardian.com/politics/2025/…Image
In 2023, the hedge fund co-founded by GB "News" owner Paul Marshall, who employs 60% of anti-Net Zero Reform UK's MPs, had £1.8 BILLION invested in fossil fuel firms.

Harborne (who has Thai citizenship under the name 'Chakrit Sakunkrit) also makes money from fossil fuels.

Read 17 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Nov 19
🧵

I and countless others are sick to death of the billionaire-funded Reform UK propaganda machine, GB “News”, and their decontextualised ‘facts’ that would make Goebbels blush.

Let’s examine the claim that “one quarter of foreign sex offenders come from just five countries”.
Yes, the raw data comes from a genuine Ministry of Justice (MoJ) prison census, but the way it’s being weaponised is deeply misleading.

The statistic sounds explosive, and deliberately so: a factoid engineered to sound like a revelation of hidden danger.
The right-wing information pipeline: a cherry-picked fragment of official data stripped of context, laundered through an opaquely funded “think tank” that isn't a think tank, amplified by billionaire-funded media, and weaponised by opportunistic politicians for electoral gain.
Read 38 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Nov 19
🧵

Reform UK’s head of Policy is a privately educated son of immigrants called Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf.

Yusuf is a shameless liar.

Below, I'll expose just a few of his more recent brazen lies and misleading claims about asylum seekers, immigrants, and ‘foreign nationals’.
In the September 2025 @SkyNews Immigration Debate, chaired by Trevor “Muslims are not like us” Phillips, Reform UK’s head of policy Zia Yusuf made a series of inaccurate and highly misleading claims about migration, and more recently, on @BBCNewsnight, about social housing. Image
These assertions are easily disproved with publicly available data, but often go largely unchallenged on air, despite being about some of the most sensitive and polarised issues in politics.

Yusuf started by claiming that UK net migration “last year” was “about a million.” Image
Read 39 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Nov 17
🧵

When a newspaper repeatedly publishes misleading, distorted, or outright inaccurate stories, the public expects independent regulators to step in.

What if I told you the editor responsible for these stories is now in charge of writing the very rules that govern press ethics? Image
Privately educated Chris Evans, editor of The Daily Telegraph since 2014, has—since January 2024—simultaneously served as Chair of the IPSO Editors’ Code of Practice Committee, the body that drafts, reviews, and rewrites the ethical rulebook that the UK press is meant to follow. Image
Evans holds this regulatory role at a time when his own paper is producing more factual corrections and clarifications than almost any other major UK outlet — with an overwhelming concentration in politically weaponised right-wing themes.

telegraph.co.uk/news/0/telegra…
Read 25 tweets
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Nov 11
🧵 OPEN LETTER

Defend the @BBC Before It’s Gone

The BBC isn’t perfect — but it’s ours. As coordinated attacks on its independence intensify, I warn that if we don’t defend it now, we may lose more than a broadcaster — we may lose a cornerstone of British democracy... Image
As a long-time critic of the @BBC, let me spell it out: what we’re seeing right now isn’t organic outrage — it’s a sophisticated coordinated campaign by ideological enemies and commercial competitors to undermine the BBC’s independence and funding. Image
If you can’t see that, you’re being played — and that’s exactly the point.

Let’s start with Michael Prescott, author of the dodgy dossier leaked exclusively to The Telegraph, who is a PR man and former political editor at Murdoch’s Sunday Times.

news.sky.com/story/who-is-m…
Read 40 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Nov 10
🧵

Growing numbers of people are angry and disillusioned with the political establishment.

Desperate voters are easy prey for manipulative populists—as they were in Germany in the 1930s.

But the problem isn't immigrants or religious minorities. It's always wealth distribution. Image
The story of wealth in Britain over the past eight decades since WWII is not one of ‘the invisible hand’, but of deliberate policy choices—choices that once built one of the most equal society in modern history, but now sustain one of the most unequal in the developed world. Image
Data tracking wealth distribution from 1945 to 2025 reveal a striking U-shaped curve: a rapid reduction in wealth inequality after World War II, making Britain one of the most equal countries on earth by the mid 1970s, followed by an unbroken rise.

Read 31 tweets

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